Carbon courage: there's no need for a consensus

Julia Gillard has said she wants a price on carbon. But, a little bit like St Augustine, she doesn't want to be environmentally pure just yet.

"First," she said on June 25th, "we will need to establish a community consensus for action."

The Prime Minister was repeating the need for consensus this week. "We need to have a dialogue with the community that leads to a deep and lasting consensus about how we will price carbon," she said in a Parliament House press conference on Tuesday.

It's not surprising that green groups have seen Gillard's statement as code for inaction. The WWF's Kelly Caught told AAP that Gillard "has continued Labor's backflip on climate change and ignored the public's sentiments." The Climate Institute's John Connor wants a "detailed plan, which would see legislation introduced in the life of the next parliament to limit and put a price tag on pollution."

Don't hold your breath.

The notion that the Australian community will come to a "deep and lasting consensus" on climate change is, to say the least, improbable. While they are a minority, climate sceptics and other doubters of the science of our warming world are numerous and vocal. And they are well-represented in the Australian Parliament.

For true disbelievers like the Liberal Party's Nick Minchin, Dennis Jensen or Cory Bernadi, the vast weight of evidence discovered by tens of thousands of the world's top climate scientists means nothing. Blinded by the association of environmentalism with the left, many in the Liberal Party prefer to believe that the entire climate change debate is some kind of conspiracy by the "extreme left", in Minchin's lurid phrase"... to sort of de-industrialise the western world.".

For Australia's business lobbies, the issue is not so much de-industrialisation as the straight-forward protection of corporate interests. The Business Council of Australia, the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Energy Suppliers Association of Australia, the Minerals Council and the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association together waged a vicious campaign against the very concept of emissions trading, while Australia's big mining and resource companies lobbied long and hard for special treatment in the Rudd Government's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, even when the eventual legislation gave the heaviest polluters 94.5 per cent of their pollution permits for free. Lined up against the big battalions of the fossil fuel lobby, green groups and ordinary citizens found their opinion counted for little.

Let's return to the idea of consensus again. There was indeed a time when it could have been said that the introduction of a price for carbon enjoyed a consensus in the Australian community, however shallow and brief that consensus may have been. That time was in 2007, when both major parties took an emissions trading scheme to voters as their climate change election policies. The Greens, Labor and Liberal - all parties which told us they stood for an emissions trading scheme - together accounted for roughly nine-tenths of Australian votes in 2007. In a modern democracy, that's about as close to a consensus as it possible gets.

Opinion polls throughout the past three years back up this point. Climate change was a significant issue for the electorate throughout 2006, 2007 and 2008, and even as late as November 2009, 52 per cent of Coalition voters supported an emissions trading scheme in Australia, according to the last Nielsen poll of Malcolm Turnbull's leadership. It still is: according to an Australian Conservation Foundation-funded opinion poll released this Monday, 45 per cent of "soft voters" would vote Labor "if Prime Minister Julia Gillard was to commit to negotiating and delivering a pollution reduction scheme within the next 12 months." Of course, whether public support would have continued in the face of mounting utility bills is another question.

But while the public supported an ETS for most of the Rudd Government, the Coalition did not. It repeatedly voted down the CPRS on the floor of Senate. So did the Greens, who took one look at the orgy of free permits given away to the big polluters and decided to vote against the bill. In the Senate chamber where it counted, the attempt to achieve consensus failed miserably.

It could have been so different. The story of climate change policy is one of the great "what ifs" of recent Australian politics.

If Malcolm Turnbull had held off the climate sceptics in his own party and retained the leadership in December last year, the CPRS might have passed with the support of both major parties. If Kevin Rudd had called a double-dissolution election in early 2010, he would probably have won, giving Labor an historic mandate to pass its CPRS at a special sitting of Parliament. Or even before this, if Rudd and his senior leadership had been prepared to negotiate with the Greens through 2009, he might have been able to take advantage of the two Liberal Senators who eventually crossed the floor to vote for the CPRS. If John Howard had won in 2007, perhaps he might have introduced an emissions trading scheme no weaker than Labor's, spurred on by the opinion polls and by his ambitious Environment Minister ... Malcolm Turnbull.

Instead we have a new consensus - for "direct action" (somehow, putting a price on carbon is now considered to be indirect action). As it stands, neither major party will go to the 2010 election promising a carbon tax or an emissions trading scheme. All of which goes to show that a consensus in politics is an evanescent thing.

The really strange thing about Julia Gillard's penchant for consensus is why she thinks she needs it.

Major policy reforms are rarely made by consensus. Many important policies have been hugely controversial, and then gone on to enjoy community support. Medicare was bitterly opposed by the Coalition in 1983, while Labor nearly defeated John Howard's first-term government in 1998 by opposing the GST. Or consider gun law reform: while most Australians supported John Howard's 1996 reforms, a significant and vocal minority opposed them.

Across the Pacific, Barack Obama's Democrats have just enacted a sweeping health reform bill, one of the most important US social policy reforms in a generation, in the face of bitter opposition from Republicans and many sections of the US community. There was no consensus in the US health reform debate: just a slim majority in favour of action, as we would expect in a modern democracy. The hard truth is that consensus is neither necessary nor sufficient in achieving important reforms.

What our new Prime Minister requires to "move forward" on climate policy is not consensus, but political willpower. Julia Gillard needs courage: the courage to spend political capital on an issue that will define the 21st century. Does she have it?

We will only find out if Labor is re-elected. Thankfully, the election will be called soon. A consensus is emerging amongst political insiders that it will be held on August 28th.